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XP SP3 Crashes Some AMD Machines
Stony Stevenson alerts us to new information on the XP SP3-induced crashes that we discussed a few days back. Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft, is maintaining an ongoing log and support site for users affected by any of several problems triggered by XP3. Machines using AMD hardware, particularly HP desktops, seem to have several modes of failure; others affect Intel machines.
I suppose now we have to wait until "Windows XP Service Pack 3" Service Pack 1 comes out before it becomes usable.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
You see, SP3 is actually a tool to make users believe they should upgrade to Vista. Relax, I'm just being Facetious.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Bah, you beat me to it. I was trying to get it, but I have SP3 installed on my computer and it crashed >.
Headline singles out AMD machines, body indicates that AMD and Intel are equally affected by various modes of crash. Sounds like someone's trying to drum down AMD stock or something... nah, we'd never have a processor partisan writing for Slash would we?
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Only had one problem on my Acer Laptop (TravelMate 8210) with SP3, it forgot that I had a wireless card, restarted and been fine since then (almost a week) so I'd say no problems for me
Wow! Your anecdote (in which you don't even mention if you're using intel or AMD) has totally changed my mind about the reliability of SP3!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on HP AMD systems is the cause.
The topic you have makes AMD look bad.
Why is HP useing the same basic image for there amd and intel systems?
What other driver bloat is in OEM systems?
Is INTEL coding there drivers to mess up AMD systems?
AMD legal should take a look at this.
I have SP3 running on my AMD right now and it's works 100%
I installed SP3 Sunday and three problems immediately cropped up that I haven't seen in the years since I first installed XP. First is a stop, BAD_POOL_POINTER 0x00000019 (0x00000020,0x8a231120, 0x8a231158, 0x1a070000). Second is a problem with the HID service not starting. Third is that PaintShop Pro (V7) now cancels all attempt to enter standby mode. Sigh...
I smurf everything and everything I smurf is perfect.
I'm on both an AMD machine and an HP desktop. Good thing I chose to wait a few months before SP3ing myself. (As for my friend, he didn't and now I'm the one laughing)
Too bad my submission from monday didn't make it, it would have made for some interesting conspiracy theories. AMD and Intel have made the briefs in their anti-trust case public (With heavy censorship^Wediting). One of AMD's contentions is that Intel's compiler is actually written to reduce speed and stability of programs it compiles when said programs are run on AMD processors.
<conspiracy>Maybe Microsoft has a deal with Intel to do the same with SP3 (and other Windows versions/SPs?) or they use Intel's compiler.</conspiracy>
Worth considering.
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I imaged my whole Windows partition, in preparation for the horrible instability that would be SP3. I then took a deep breath, and started the download, figuring it would take several hours.
It went reasonably quickly, had exactly one reboot (which brought me fully up to date; no "critical updates" after that), and then ran solidly while I played Portal for another five or six hours.
I was almost disappointed.
It was an Intel machine, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As I understand it, this only impacts Windows XP users who are running computers with AMD or Intel processors. There is no evidence of SP3 introducing problems on XP machines with alternative architectures.
It's an Intel T7400, I was hoping that people would look it up, highest end when I bought it last year
My machine works fine with SP3, not a single problem. How's two anecdotes for ya, bitch?
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
It's all in the eye of the beholder. To me, the topic says: "M$ can't make software for other architectures than intel." or; "M$ can't make software. Period." Hopefully people read a lot more than just topics though.
HP should NOT be using the same image for their Intel and AMD-based systems. There's always one for the Intel systems and one for AMD systems of each type (So, a DV2000 laptop has two generic system images, one for Intel-based and one for AMD-based. It's almost ALWAYS been this way.)
By the way, this appears to be Microsoft's problem, since HP maintains and is responsible for their own recovery images (all customized for each model and revision of laptop) and their own drivers.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Isn't the original purpose of a service pack to add reliability, rather than take it away?
One would think that by SP3 there would only the most minor bugs left to close, but instead giant new ones are opened. Machines that become unbootable? That's pre-alpha quality stuff.
Something is badly broken with their methodology... no wonder they were trying to do a people grab at Yahoo, the higher ups are probably pulling their hair out by now trying to figure out how to fix their organizational problem and maybe they thought a new project built on BSD (but independent from Apple code) with entirely new staff would bail them out.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
not exactly a cut and dry SP3 problem and certainly not an AMD or INTEL issue at all.
people who write this crap need to all be thrown in a cage and be made to rip each other apart.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"SP3 causes the computer to crash during boot, and Windows XP, by default, is set up to automatically reboot when it crashes. That is why you end up in the endless rebooting scenario."
Nope, no relation at all. After all, crashing is perfectly normal.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Yeah because it's definitively Microsoft's fault that HP is packing Intel drivers on their AMD machines. Typical baseless Microsoft Hatred.
I'm waiting for Service Pack 3.11
One data point. Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe w/ 1502 BIOS version and an AMD 64 X2 4600+ is OK so far.
Moderation in everything, including moderation.
The World is our Beta Tester.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I got hit by this bug when the patch went live last week on Windowsupdate. As the article states, the solution in was to disable intelppm.sys from safemode. It's a lot quicker if you do it using autoruns. It's too bad this article wasn't posted last week. It would have saved me a lot of trouble shooting time.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
All in all, it still seems to be faring much better than Vista SP1. For what it's worth, the latter is still disabled on Windows Update for one of my PCs (because of "incompatible hardware or drivers").
Yeah, sensationalism as usual, I've got SP3 running perfectly on an AMD and an Intel system, both with no problems and the same as they were with SP2.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Similarly, these anecdotes about SP3 crashing computers have totally changed my mind about the reliability of SP3. It works both ways...
All your base are belong to Wii.
Quite simply, if MS wanted to keep customers they would create a product with zero problems (or as close as they can get) and push it out at a VERY competitive price. That is how the marketplace is supposed to work. When your namebrand is trashed, you have to compete extra hard. MS seems unwilling to do this, or at least has failed to show that they are trying to do so.
That might just be bad business decisions on their part, but whether it was malicious or stupidity does not matter. In either case the end result is that MS loses more customers. Nobody wanted to hear that MS was losing or soon to be dead a year ago when predictions were rife, but here it is, in your face. MS is consistently failing to either impress or produce quality product. The dragon^H^H^H^H^Hcathedral is near death... is it time for the penny market to celebrate?
Not on your life, it will be time to celebrate when the dried bones of the dragon are used up as party favors. Until then, it is time to keep competing aggressively, and nothing short of that will do. Competition, not patents, drives innovation. Innovation will bring us secure computing at home. A kind of secure that behaves friendly to the end user.
Now, am I bashing MS for pleasure? No, it is because MS products are in their deathbed and nothing short of a complete restart will get them out of it. It does not appear that MS will do that. There is nothing in current or near future activity that shows MS will do anything different from what got them in the death bed to start with. The beast is dieing. There is nothing more to say.
Call that a troll if you will, but the truth hurts sometimes. Do I want it to die? NO! Emphatically NO!!!! Without competition, quality dies. Would I like to see MS slide into a comfortable second place? Yes.... and the reasons are simple, just ask any Linux fanboi for them.
SP3 failed utterly in the face of the current market that MS faces. There is NO excuse for that in business. If you believe the art of war extends to business, MS deserves to be beheaded ungracefully. That is how business goes, so don't bother telling me that I'm a troll.
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I recall some HP machines had serious problems (driver related?) with installing XP2 too.
First Vista Post!
Uhh, hello? Anybody still there?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Anyone who build Windows XP images that are rolled out onto both AMD and Intel machines should have long ago learned about the stop code 0x0000007E perils that come from the intelppm driver. The root of all evil here is that processors are not plug and play devices as far as XP is concerned and their associated drivers are hardcoded to start at boot time. Why the hell Microsoft has not taken the time to update intelppm.sys to check for a GenuineIntel x86 Family XX Model YY Stepping ZZ ID before touching HW specific registers is a mystery to me (I hope the conspiricy theorists amongst you will regale me with much food for thought).
Why bother? It's just as fast to reinstall Windows (and you can do it on the same partition, so all you lose are a few settings).
First, this configuration obviously worked fine for SP2. Second, Microsoft controls the driver certification process, so they should be able to ensure that Intel drivers aren't loading on an AMD system. This is a pretty minor fuckup, but it's firmly in MS's lap.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This story making the rounds with unwarranted AMD-user-scaring headlines is typical of the kind of FUD that Intel shills have been spreading. There is a gaggle of them here on slashdot and most other blogs and boards of any reach. Most review sites with any impact have been bought and paid for.
"Why not? Shouldn't Windows be flexible enough to use a single system image for commonly available hardware?"
Sadly, no. Due to HP's design methodology, the differences between Intel and AMD based systems are vast. Almost none of the hardware is common, minus the video and perhaps the sound. AMD laptops generally use a Broadcom wireless adapter while Intel uses an Intel-branded wireless adapter, for example. Even the SATA controllers use different drivers (different chipsets, after all,) so even more special drivers are required.
I hated working on laptops for just that reason, so many images to remember for each model and variation. I used to keep a copy of just drivers and a fresh OEM install disc, say screw the laptop reimage bench, and get the OS reinstalled far faster than the overloaded GHOST network.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's not the only issue with SP3. One of my monitors is rotated 90 degrees (widescreen that I use upright), thanks to the ATI driver's rotate function.
After rebooting following SP3 install, all my monitors went completely berzerk. They fell back to 4 bits colors (I didn't even know there WAS a 4 bit mode), with some weird effects. Also, rotation was not possible.
It took me about an hour to find a way to bring back monitors to decent resolution and colors. I still couldn't get rotation to work, no matter how hard I tried (Combination of card, drivers, update from ATI, etc)
Then finally I google a bit and found a few forums with user complaints of the same type of problem. So I uninstalled SP3, rebooted, and voilà, everything back to normal.
Needless to say, I promply logged back into WSUS and removed SP3 from the approved for installed list.
Sorry I'm late. I was playing an mp3, drove the latency right up.
I guess I don't understand your POV. Just because you had to sit on it for work doesn't mean that's the right way to proceed. All these things have vendor strings and PCI IDs, Windows should be smart enough to ignore irrelevant drivers. Linux boots on all this stuff with a single kernel after all.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What was the point in all the years spent by the PC industry on "Plug & Play", implementing ideas like unique IDs allocated by a manufacturer to their hardware devices and an operating system which can scan these IDs and choose drivers accordingly?
I'm running Windows XP SP 3 on an AMD machine and I'm doing just fi
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Rewrite: "Over time, Microsoft Windows XP tends to mysteriously ... decrease stability and performance (in every way imaginable".
I've experienced that, many times. Windows is unstable. The instability helps Microsoft sell new versions of its operating system.
Summary of the Slashdot article about Windows XP SP3 crashes:
Microsoft has known about one of the underlying problems for a long time. See KB888372. It would have been easy to prevent the crashes merely by having SP3 installation do the work mentioned in the KB888372 article. However, apparently because of work avoidance, or an attempt to discourage people from using Windows XP, Microsoft did not do the necessary work.
"The instability helps Microsoft sell new versions of its operating system. "
That would be fine if the newer versions were stabler. My experience with Vista has left me longing for XP.
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You can do it - if you make sure that you're building an install image with the correct OEM drivers on board, booting with the generic HAL, etc. It sounds like HP isn't doing what they'd need to do to build a actual "universal" image. Hardly surprising - back when we used to buy HP where I work, HP was of little help preparing a custom system image for 500+ identical business computers. They just weren't set up to deal with it - we had to send an employee to HP. Contrast that with IBM/Lenovo - they actually know how to do this.
It's certainly Microsoft's fault that their operating system can't figure out at boot-time which drivers are appropriate for the platform it's booting on and only loading those.
Mac OS X and Linux both do this. Why can't Windows?
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
"The link you gave discusses a symptom that applies to SP2 users, not users who ran SP2 fine then 'upgraded' to SP3 and crashes."
Read the article referenced in the Slashdot story. Also, the Microsoft KB article says:
"APPLIES TO
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (SP2)
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, when used with:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Home Edition".
The story referenced by the Slashdot story rings true to me. The kind of sloppiness in programming we see from Microsoft sometimes re-activates stopped system services.
1) You are assuming there is an OS market to create a competitive price against, when in fact the business choices are M$, M$ and, well, M$ (unless you count those bit players: Unix, Linux, and Apple).
2) You are assuming and intelligent rational buyer's market, when there is only currently a seller's market (ie in the words of my infinitely wise toddler "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit").
The MS Spin machine will, and has already begun to, spin a new myth around SP3 to dazzle and disarm, and the fiasco will be averted yet again. While in the meantime, it becomes another brick in the crypt of MS among the more educated masses. I'll not argue that Windows is dieing a slow death, but we disagree with perhaps the timespan.